Feb 18 The Oneness of Humanity

Through my observation of life it seems clear to me that everyone has the need to feel safe. I see this need as intrinsic. It is possible to see this need demonstrated within and throughout nature. We all have the will to survive. The whole of life has the will to survive. It would seem to me that no one would enjoy the sense of fear that arises out of the need to feel safe. When we do not feel safe we suffer. We feel stressed and defensive. We become inclined to want to build a wall around ourselves and to close our hearts in order to protect ourselves from whatever we understand to be the source of our harm.

Just as everyone has the need to feel safe it also makes sense to me that no one wants to hurt. No one enjoys the experience of pain and suffering. I don't think that anyone would actively seek it out. I understand there to be an aspect of pain and suffering that is personal and unique to each person and their individual circumstances and there is also a pain or a hurt that is universal and is shared throughout the whole of humanity and that hurt carries within it a tremendous sense of and loss.

If someone were to take hold of your left arm and pull it to the left and someone else were to take your right arm and pull it to the right it would hurt. You would feel the pain of being torn apart from yourself. You would feel the pain of yourself being separated from yourself.

From my understanding throughout our history humanity as a group has behaved as if we understood ourselves as being separate. This idea has been institutionalized and become the mode of functioning within most all of our systems and we have for the most part accepted that this is how things work. Understanding ourselves to be separate has enabled exploitation and oppression to take hold and to become a root cause of tremendous pain and suffering. The idea that we are separate has opened the door for us to see ourselves as enemies therefore experiencing ourselves as having the need to protect ourselves from each other.

We are not from my understanding of things separate. We are an interdependent interwoven whole. This can be understood by observing nature. Everything comes from somewhere and is going somewhere. Everything is growing and evolving. Everything needs everything else in order to continue to exist. We are a vast diverse and complex Oneness. It only makes sense that as long as we continue to understand ourselves to be separate that we are going against the natural flow of life and therefore against the way we have been constructed. It also makes sense that if we continue to go against the flow of nature that we will continue to create suffering and we will then be compelled to have to continue to experience the suffering that we have created.

When I first heard then Senator Obama speak my immediate assessment was that a sense of oneness was at the root of what he valued. In a recent speech President Obama gave in Illinois he included the idea that we are one. He spoke of unity and division. It is clear that unity is a value that he holds. President Obama seems to have an important attribute. He seems to have the capacity to start with an ideal and then hold up every situation he is confronted with to that ideal and then to find ways to begin to actualize the ideal taking whatever steps are needed to evolve each situation in the direction of the ideal. Through the words and actions of this President we have been given a gift of a template of how to grow and evolve our understanding that we are one and how to heal the division that we have created and in which we are participants.

It appears evident to me that if we want to put an end to the pain and suffering that we have participated in creating then we are going to need to begin to understand that we are one. We are going to need to understand this idea first as individuals and then in our communities and then globally. We are going to need to find ways to act in accordance with and to begin to embody this idea. Then we will be able to plant and nurture the seeds of this idea so that it is able to grow. In this way we will be able to recreate our systems in a way that moves in the direction of a more just world and we will begin to exist in harmony with the natural order of life.

The reality as I see it is that we are not separate but we are each unique individuals and if we were to bring the tremendous richness and diversity of our uniqueness to the service of the whole and to our understanding that we are one it would be to the benefit of everyone without exception. We all carry the imprint of the hurt that we share. We all experience the sense of loss of ourselves. We are all responsible for the world that we have created whether we are aware of it or not and we have the opportunity to take hold of that responsibility and begin to reconstruct our world starting within our awareness of ourselves and then within our actions. If we want to feel safe and if we want to heal the hurt that we have created and in which we share we are going to need to begin to see ourselves as one and begin to bring our actions into harmony with the idea of the Oneness of Humanity. This will enable us to begin to live with an open heart. From my understanding there is no second option.